3 Signs Your Ecommerce Brand Needs a New Email Marketing Strategy
At Flowsense, we see countless ecommerce brands building their digital marketing strategies around platforms like Facebook, Google, TikTok, and more. While these channels can deliver great results, there's often a crucial piece to the puzzle missing: a solid email marketing strategy. This can be the key to boosting your store’s conversion rates and really showcasing what makes your brand unique.
So, why email marketing?
Implementing an email marketing strategy allows your ecommerce business to deliver targeted, timely messages to your audience in a strategic manner. How? Because you own your audience, compared to renting one from media buying platforms (like Facebook and Google), which means you have more opportunity to nurture and retarget with branded messages at any point in the customer journey.
Plus, the most obvious point: they’ve given you their email. They’re expecting to hear from you.
Maybe you’ve dabbled in crafting an email marketing strategy for ecommerce in the past, maybe you even have a few automated emails set up. Or maybe you’re brand new to the game and setting up an email strategy for your brand will help you achieve some pretty cool things, such as:
Improving your overall MROI (marketing return on investment)
Generating first-party data that your brand owns
Nurturing your leads into repeat business
Freeing up your focus by leveraging the power of automated email campaigns.
Either way, these are the three signs your brand needs a new ecommerce email marketing strategy:
Are you spending big on retargeting ads but experiencing low conversion rates?
Do your customers shop with you once and then are never to be seen again?
Do you have a high number of customers abandoning their shopping cart without coming back to complete their order?
If you answered YES to one or more of these questions, keep on reading!
(Or skip the blog and hit us up – we’d be happy to chat through it with you).
Sign 1: Low ROI from Retargeting Ads
Returning to our intro about privacy and iPhones once more, that market share Apple holds has seen the cost of running retargeting ads on Facebook higher than ever before. With more and more iOS users choosing to opt out of ad tracking, retargeting windows are reduced, making audience sizes a lot smaller.
Throw in that media platforms are making it easier and easier to self-serve on their platforms, and competition only keeps increasing – meaning your spend goes up for a smaller slice of the potential-customer-pie.
However, by leveraging the power of automated email marketing and dynamic email campaigns, retargeting just became a whole lot cheaper. Or cost-effective, as we prefer to call it.
By introducing key automated flows, such as re-engagement and abandoned cart, you have the advantage of being able to communicate directly with prospects and previous customers (ones you’ve already paid to acquire) at the right time to entice them to shop with you or come back to place another order.
By leveraging email marketing platforms like Klaviyo, we can create user segments that have placed orders in the past, abandoned their shopping cart, viewed products, provided a review and much more. The opportunities to retarget your audience are practically endless – and with the right ecommerce email marketing strategy, revenue attribution can be as high as 20-40%.
Sign 2: Low Returning Customer Rates
Did you know it’s five times cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one? (Thanks Forbes). If you focus solely on getting new customers to purchase from your store (for example via traffic or lead ads), you lose out on a huge opportunity to re-engage customers you’ve already attracted and may have already paid for in the acquisition phase.
The average benchmark for returning customer rates (or retention rates) for an ecommerce store sits around the 25-30% mark (according to Shopify). While this does vary between different brands, price points and industries, increasing the number of customers who repurchase from your store will help to create a loyal fanbase of people who know and trust your brand and will advocate for you by providing positive reviews and propagating word-of-mouth.
Just ask Flowsense wordsmith Cass Whitaker – the majority of her wardrobe is made up of Decjuba clothing. Their email marketer deserves a raise.
So, how do you turn your first-time customers into repeat business and lower your overall acquisition costs?
Two words. Customer Advocacy.
Having a quality email marketing strategy for ecommerce in place can help to improve retention rates, through automated flows or well-thought-out dynamic email campaigns – and it all starts from the moment a customer places their first order.
Ask yourself these questions:
What does your brand’s post-purchase experience look like?
Are you communicating with your buyers about their order status?
Are you following them up and asking for a review?
Are you keeping them up-to-date with the latest product drops, restocks and trends?
And most importantly (in this privacy-focused climate), have you given them an opportunity to let you know how often they want to hear from you, and what about?
All of this is essential in ensuring your customers have the best experience possible, encouraging them to keep your brand top of mind when in the consideration phase of the buyer’s journey. You could even offer tiered incentives or a gift to really surprise and delight your customers. It’s about standing it in all the best ways – in a way that makes sense for your brand.
Sign 3: High Abandoned Cart Rates
Did you know that around 70% of shopping carts on ecommerce stores are abandoned (as per data from the Baymard Institute)? That’s equivalent to 70 potential customers out of a 100 walking straight back out the door.
While abandoned cart rates vary across industries and price points, there’s so much opportunity to increase your sales by lowering your abandoned cart rate.
While most ecommerce businesses have tried abandoned cart emails or at least heard of them, many struggle to generate results as they aren’t utilising all of the features their email software has to offer. Chances are you’re recovering some carts through your abandoned cart email (if you have one set up), but you still could be leaving money on the table.
A strategically designed and implemented abandoned cart email has an average open rate of around 45% and an approximate click-through rate of 10% (Omnisend, 2023) – that’s a game changer when we compound these metrics at scale.
Abandoned cart emails do all the grunt work by operating tirelessly in the background, reiterating the important information about your store’s unique selling points and drawing customers back to complete their purchase.
Also, let’s keep in mind customer expectations. Savvy online shoppers often wait for that abandoned cart email because they want to see what your store has to offer. And if your offer is lacklustre or nonexistent, they may move onto the next store.
Bonus tip: Newsletter subscribers
Returning to the idea of customer expectations, let’s talk about newsletter sign-ups. Many ecommerce businesses offer a promotion, such as free shipping or 10% off if a user signs up to their newsletter. The customer signs up, gets the welcome freebie, and then promptly unsubscribes.
Now what?
Maintaining a healthy database of newsletter subscribers is a key component of ensuring you can do all the exciting workflows we’ve discussed in this blog. It’s important to consider a welcome series that doesn’t overwhelm – and has something to offer. And it doesn’t always have to be a freebie; sometimes helpful advice is enough to keep that unsubscribe rate down.
Refresh your email marketing with Flowsense today
If your store is experiencing indicators of a bleeding marketing budget, setting up a bespoke and thorough email marketing strategy specific to ecommerce can be pivotal in addressing this.
Flowsense specialises in working with both growing and established ecommerce businesses that want to own more of their data, generate more revenue, lower overall costs and leverage the power of automation to consolidate their digital ecosystem.
Get in touch to learn more about how we can help your brand with its email marketing refresh.